"Totally coup, yo."

So this column’s going back to the multi-topic format, and we’ve got a school-related theme this week. It’s funny how I started this thinking it would force me to write within a certain formula only to tweak it for each of the first three.

Please don’t sue.

There’s some good news in England, where they’ve stopped publicly funding schools which teach creationism as science. That link’s from The Guardian and usually they do a good job but the headline (“Richard Dawkins celebrates a victory over creationists”) sucks. It’s not just Richard Dawkins who wins in this, it’s all of us. Even people who don’t like Dawkins benefit from not having to pay teachers to indoctrinate students with nonsense.

It’s kind of interesting that the UK was able to do this without having a separation of church and state. Here in the US, advocates of science have depended largely on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to keep creationism out of science classes. In cases like Edwards. v. Aguilard, those who argued for teaching science in science classes only had to demonstrate that what creationists were proposing amounted to a government establishment of religion.

Creationists have responded by re-branding their creationism “Intelligent Design,” which differs from creationism only in that they claim that the intelligent designer they propose doesn’t necessarily have to be a supernatural god. It could be aliens, for example. Unfortunately for them, the defenders of science have found the transitional fossils which prove ID is nothing but a cover for the same old biblical literalism which US courts have already rejected.

Where the History Channel and the Discovery Institute converge.

Even if the creationists were sincere in their claims about aliens, it’d still be pseudoscience for pretty much the same reasons a God-based creationism is pseudoscience. So it’s nice to see that if for some reason it became necessary to fight against that brand of nonsense here in America without using the separation of church and state, we could. It’d be like beating up a 86 year old with one hand tied behind your back – a little more challenging than usual, but still fairly easy and lots of fun, too.

One hypnosis victim (left) went on a brutal path of vengeance to find the dickshit who imprisoned him.

Someone is crazy here, but I’m not sure who. Either the parents are using the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy in order to insinuate that the hypnosis caused the suicide, or he really did program the kid to kill himself. It sucks, but students do kill themselves all the time without having anything to do with hypnosis. And it looks like this principal was pretty excited about hypnosis, so it’s not too unusual that among all the students he hypnotized, one of them would be suicidal for unrelated reasons.

But at the same time, remember being a kid in school and how powerful and mysterious the principal of the school seemed to be? What if the possibility of the principal having the power to control your mind were thrown into the mix? That’d be terrifying. Kids would be afraid to even pass a note in class or throw a paper airplane because if they got caught, they might get sent to the principal’s office where he would program you to piss your pants whenever your teacher told the class to open your Math textbooks. So even though it’s probably not possible to use hypnosis to influence someone to kill themself, you can see why the parents would be a little upset.

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Just when the British are finally getting their shit together and rejecting pseudoscience from their classrooms, we here in the States are going to be teaching more of it to our kids. It’s like they say: When God closes a door for creationists, he opens a window for anthropogenic global warming deniers.

But the Brits are supposed to be the backwards ones here. They’re the ones with a monarchy. They’re the ones with an official state religion. They’re the ones threatening students with expulsion for posting internet comics mocking Islam. They’re the ones calling a snack “tea.” They’re the fuckers who gave us terrible people with the first name Andrew like Wakefield and Sullivan. We should be miles – yeah, miles – ahead of them in this department. But instead here we are in 2012 with a small group of cranks monitoring our classrooms to make sure science teachers aren’t being too dismissive of their ideology-driven beliefs about global climate change.

The only cool thing to come out of England since 1066

We should all be sickened by this. It’s one thing for people to grow attached to goofy ideas after they’ve reached adulthood, but it’s something else altogether to indoctrinate students with those same goofy ideas in the very institution which is supposed to give them the mental tools they need to defend themselves against them.

Fortunately the National Center for Science Education is on the case. They’ve hired staff tasked specifically with fighting this ugly trend in politicizing science in public schools. Previously the NCSE mostly dealt with creationism, so this new development is kind of a big deal for them.

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One last thing, and if you regularly read atheist/freethought news outlets you’ve probably already heard about this. A high school student named Jessica Ahlquist successfully sued in order to get a prayer banner removed from her Cranston, RI school cafeteria. Cranston is of course the city best known for portraying the role of Walter White on the TV show Breaking Bad.

So of course when a 16 year old girl wins a fight against people with little to no understanding of how the law in America works, you know what comes next: Christian threats! Here are some of the classier ones:

“I think everyone should just fight this girl”

“what a little bitch lol i wanna snuff her”

“lol i wanna stick that bitch lol”

“Brb ima go drown that atheist in holy water”

And to make it even worse, even someone supposedly on “our side” decided to be a big jerk about it to whine about how he feels victimized by women on twitter:

I’d call him a pussy for being so offended by feminism, but that’d probably defeat the point.So I’ll just follow Dan Savage’s advice and call him a scrotum.

Politicians in Rhode Island are piling on Ahlquist, too. Some piece of slime / Democrat (but I repeat myself) named Peter Palumbo called her an “evil little thing” on some ham radio show. A state Senator/caps-lock enthusiast named Beth Moura called her an “ACLU sweetheart.” Based on the context and the fact that she’s a Republican, Moura presumably thinks that defending the Constitution and civil liberties is a horrible thing. But with any luck, these cheap shots at a teenage girl who’s smarter than both of them put together will be the closest either of these losers get to any kind of fame or power.

The American history and early American lit geeks among us probably know Rhode Island as one of the first states with a strict separation of church and state. The guy who basically founded it, Roger Williams, was a preacher who was pretty adamant about keeping religion and politics separate. It’s worth remembering that while doubters of religion tend to be the ones who are most outspoken about defending the Establishment Clause, those values really are in the interest of the religious believers. One thing religions are good at is forming schisms, and who’s to say your’s is going to be in the majority forever? Keeping the government secular protects those with religion just as much as it does those of us without.

Anyway, this story has a happy ending because it looks like Ahlquist will be less massively in debt after college than most other students her age. Her supporters set up a scholarship fund for her which as I’m writing this has collected over 22K$ for Ahlquist’s college education. Chip in if you can.

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So that’s all I’ve got for this week, kids. Hopefully you read this column on your iPhone during a boring class. Back in my day we didn’t have cell phones in school. Most adults didn’t even have cell phones. Some of us had pagers, and we had to come up with these weird codes to tell each other things using only numbers. And if you wanted a call back, you had to be at a place with an old fogey land line phone. And if we wanted to see a movie and missed it in the theaters, we had to wait until it came out on VHS. Do you even know what VHS is? Nevermind, just get off my lawn, my back hurts, tell me how to get to the shuffleboard court, my maid is stealing from me, etc.

That’s funny… when I went to school (City Honors, Lafayette) the principals didn’t seem powerful and mysterious… they just seemed like idiotic authoritarian assholes who were more concerned with control than education.

Beast_Fan

Grown men and women attacking a child. How mature. But good for Jessica

Pan Demonium

“it’s not too unusual that among all the students he hypnotized, one of them would be suicidal for unrelated reasons.”
The story in the link actually says that TWO of those students committed suicide in seperate incidents (which is at least twice as unlikely, right?)

Also: Where’s the fucking list?
We love lists, remember?!

http://www.buffalobeast.com/ Josh Bunting

@Pan, As I said, one student killed himself *the day after* the principal hypnotized him. Another committed suicide 5 months afterwards. It might be twice as unlikely to have happened by chance if both times one immediately followed the other, but that’s not the way it happened.

@Jafafa Yeah, I think I saw it similarly in my later high school years, but for most of the time I was in school I perceived authority figures with more deference. This might come as a shock to some of our audience, but I was actually kind of a huge dork in school. No, really. But the point I was trying to get at was that most parents would think that this guy’s abusing his position of authority by using hypnosis on students without license, even if what he was doing didn’t have the kind of power he believed it to have.

Use of the term “tea” is not just some blanket colloquialism for any type of “snack”, rather it refers to any substantive foodstuff(possibly a sandwich or a full meal) consumed after 5-6pm(ish).

I know wikipedia was blacked out for a day but do your homework Bunting.

http://www.buffalobeast.com/ Josh Bunting

It’s not a lack of research, I’m just too ‘Merican to comprehend the difference. USA! USA! USA!

Gus Blofeld

….contemporary middle/working class of course.

Beast_Fan

@Blofeld

I thought you died in “For Your Eyes Only”?

hmm

how come when i tried to email you some new aged crap being marketed to desperate parents, i had a server error?

Anyway as education gets more standardized, anytime conservative christians get power they will have the future minds in their control. Beware!

I also could give you insight on how ridiculous the american education corporation of america is. And not to mention the pledge of allegiance is said when kids (and many parents) don’t understand the contents of the words and they say under god in public (or my case charter) schools.

Anywho i went to catholic school and we were taught darwinism. We were also taught about the crazies who tried to arrest the science teacher for teaching darwinism. It’s strange that i went to catholic school in the 90′s and had a non scripture based science class? while in many places kids were in public school and had more scripture influence in their lessons.

Try being a parent in the Buffalo school district now, the DPCC whose suppose to represent me is heavily influenced by various church organizations. Look at their website and who is behind them. Along with these other “grass root” education groups in the wny area.

hmm

Suicide is in the headlines so it will happen more. Didn’t anyone see “Heathers?”

These parents suing sound like bad parents. We live in a country were people want to put the dead on a pedastil. And parents often spend time analyzing rather than interacting with their kids and they try to be friends rather than parents.

I tell my kids when i make they do something wrong, don’t feel guilty try and fix it, if you can’t, you can’t but atleast you tried. If they tell me i am mean because i punish them i tell them good that means i am doing my job and then tell them that they are in more trouble for talking back now. I can be fun and play games, but my job is too get them ready for the world.

Jam_i_am

Ancient Aliens? My favorite show! How can you denigrate it like that? It’s so totally awesomely obviously what happened… Sheesh I thought you guys were open-minded.

-Heartbroken descendant of DNA-manipulated gold-mining slaves of the Anunaki

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